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Pickup Prosperity

Blog Post | Economic Growth

Pickup Prosperity

Pickups have become between 33 and 53 percent less expensive in the United States over last 50 years. For the time of work required to buy one pickup in 1970, a blue-collar worker can get between 1.5 and 2.12 pickups today.

Summary: This article examines the affordability of pickup trucks in the United States over the last 50 years. It compares the time price and monthly payment rate of a 1970 Ford pickup with a modern F150 and some equivalent models from other countries. It concludes that pickups have become between 33 and 53 percent less expensive, depending on the calculation method.


Have pickups become more affordable in the last 50 years? We can start by comparing a pickup built in 1970 to one built today, even though the two are almost as different as a Yugo and a Lexus.

According to the National Auto Dealers Association’s NADAguide, a basic Ford pickup sold for $2,599 in 1970. That year, a U.S. blue-collar worker’s compensation rate (incl. wages and benefits) was $3.93 per hour. Therefore, it took a blue-collar worker 661.3 hours of work to buy a pickup in 1970.

Today, a basic F150 costs $28,940, and a blue-collar worker’s compensation rate is $32.54 per hour. That indicates a time price of 889.4 hours of work – an increase of around 35 percent since 1970.

But Ford pickup trucks have become much higher quality over the last fifty years. A modern F150 gets 22 miles per gallon in the city and 30 miles per gallon on the highway. In 1970, a basic Ford pickup got 12 and 14, respectively. Modern pickups also have longer warranties (i.e., 36 months in 2021 versus 12 months in 1970) and are more reliable, powerful, comfortable, and safe than in 1970.

If we say that pickups today are twice as good as they were in 1970 (a conservative estimate), we should cut the time price of today’s F150 in half to account for the rise in quality. In other words, a pickup of 1970s quality would cost 444.7 hours of work today. That indicates that the time price decreased by 33 percent.

Another factor to consider is that most people don’t pay cash when they buy a new vehicle. Instead, they get a loan. So, the payment is more important than the price. The interest rate on a car loan was around 11.5 percent in 1970. Today, it is 4.25 percent.

A five-year loan translates to monthly payments of $57.16 for a 1970 pickup and $536.25 for the F150. Those numbers are equivalent to monthly payment rates of 14.54 hours of work in 1970 and 16.48 hours of work in 2021 – an increase of 13 percent.

However, if we consider the 2021 model to be 100 percent better than the 1970 model, the 2021 monthly payment falls to 8.24 hours of work (i.e., 43 percent less than the 1970 payment). Put differently, a customer gets 1.76 times more pickup for his or her money today than in 1970.

Another way to calculate pickup affordability is to look at modern cars that are equivalent to the 1970 Ford pickup in quality. India’s Mahindra, China’s Foton and JAC, and Japan’s Toyota still make pickups that are similar to the 1970 Ford model. Those pickups cost around $10,000. At the U.S. blue-collar worker compensation rate of $32.54 an hour, the time price of the above models equals 307 hours of work.

Comparing the 1970 Ford pickup to equivalent modern vehicles suggests that pickups have become 53 percent less expensive. For the time of work required to buy one pickup in 1970, a customer can get 2.12 today. Put differently, pickups have become 112 percent more abundant in the last 50 years.

Thanks to creative innovators, risk-taking entrepreneurs, and global competition, pickups have undergone significant improvements in the last 50 years. Those need to be taken into account when estimating pickup abundance.

Blog Post | Manufacturing

Grim Old Days: Virginia Postrel’s Fabric of Civilization

Beneath today’s abundance of clothing lies a long and brutal history.

Summary: Virginia Postrel’s book weaves a sweeping history of textiles as both drivers of innovation and toil. From ancient women spinning for months to make a single garment to brutal sumptuary laws and dye trades steeped in labor and odor, it is revealed how fabric shaped the foundations of human society.


Virginia Postrel’s The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World is the riveting story of how humanity’s quest for thread, cloth, and clothing built modern civilization, by motivating achievements from the Neolithic Revolution to the Industrial Revolution and more. While much of the book contains inspiring tales of innovation, artistry, and entrepreneurship, the parts of the book about the preindustrial era also reveal some dark and disturbing facts about the past.

In the preindustrial era, clothing was often painstakingly produced at home. Postrel estimates that, in Roman times, it took a woman about 909 hours—or 114 days, almost 4 months—to spin enough wool into yarn for a single toga. With the later invention of the spinning wheel, the time needed to produce yarn for a similarly sized garment dropped to around 440 hours, or 50 days. Even in the 18th century, on the eve of industrialization, Yorkshire wool spinners using the most advanced treadle spinning wheels of the time would have needed 14 days to produce enough yarn for a single pair of trousers. Today, by contrast, spinning is almost entirely automated, with a single worker overseeing machines that are able to produce 75,000 pounds of yarn a year—enough to knit 18 million T-shirts.

Most preindustrial women devoted enormous amounts of time to producing thread, which they learned how to make during childhood. It is not an exaggeration to say, as Postrel does, “Most preindustrial women spent their lives spinning.” This was true across much of the world. Consider Mesoamerica:

At only four years old, an Aztec girl was introduced to spinning tools. By age six, she was making her first yarn. If she slacked off or spun poorly, her mother punished her by pricking her wrists with thorns, beating her with a stick, or forcing her to inhale chili smoke.

These girls often multitasked while spinning: “preindustrial spinners could work while minding children or tending flocks, gossiping or shopping, or waiting for a pot to boil.” The near-constant nature of the task meant that prior to the Industrial Revolution, “industry’s visual representation was a woman spinning thread: diligent, productive, and absolutely essential” to the functioning of society, and from antiquity onward cloth-making was viewed as a key feminine virtue. Ancient Greek pottery portrays spinning “as both the signature activity of the good housewife and something prostitutes do between clients,” showing that women of different social classes were bound to spend much of their lives engaged in this task.

Women of every background worked day and night, but still, their efforts were never enough. “Throughout most of human history, producing enough yarn to make cloth was so time-consuming that this essential raw material was always in short supply.”

Having sufficient spun yarn or thread was only the beginning; it still had to be transformed into cloth. “It took three days of steady work to weave a single bolt of silk, about thirteen yards long, enough to outfit two women in blouses and trousers,” although silk-weavers themselves could rarely afford to wear silk. According to Postrel, a Chinese poem from the year 1145, paired with a painting of a modestly dressed, barefoot peasant weaving silk, suggests that “the couple in damask silk . . . should think of the one who wears coarse hemp.”

Subdued colors often defined the clothing of the masses. “‘Any weed can be a dye,’ fifteenth-century Florentine dyers used to say. But that’s only if you want yellows, browns, or grays—the colors yielded by the flavonoids and tannins common in shrubs and trees.” Other dye colors were harder to produce.

In antiquity, Tyrian purple was a dye derived from crushed sea snails, and the notoriously laborious and foul-smelling production process made it expensive. As a result, it became a status symbol, despite the repulsive stench that clung to the fabric it colored. In fact, according to Postrel, the poet Martial included “a fleece twice drenched in Tyrian dye” in a list of offensive odors, with a joke that a wealthy woman wore the reeking color to conceal her own body odor. The fetor became a status symbol. “Even the purple’s notorious stench conveyed prestige, because it proved the shade was the real thing, not an imitation fashioned from cheaper plant dyes.” The color itself was not purple, despite the name, but a dark hue similar to the color of dried blood. Later, during the Renaissance, Italian dyers yielded a bright red from crushed cochineal insects imported from the Americas, as well as other colors that were created by using acidic bran water that was said to smell “like vomit.”

Numerous laws strictly regulated what people were allowed to wear. Italian city-states issued more than 300 sumptuary laws between 1300 and 1500, motivated in part by revenue-hungry governments’ appetite for fines. For example, in the early 1320s, Florence forbade women from owning more than four outfits that were considered presentable enough to wear outside. Postrel quotes the Florentine sumptuary law official Franco Sacchetti as writing that women often ignored the rules and argued with officials until the latter gave up on enforcement; he ends his exasperated account with the saying, “What woman wants the Lord wants, and what the Lord wants comes to pass.” But enough fines were collected to motivate officials to enact ever more restrictions.

In Ming Dynasty China, punishment for dressing above one’s station could include corporal punishment or penal servitude. Yet, as in Florence, and seemingly nearly everywhere that sumptuary laws were imposed, such regulations were routinely flouted, with violators willing to risk punishment or fines. In France in 1726, the authorities harshened the penalty for trafficking certain restricted cotton fabrics, which were made illegal in 1686, to include the death penalty. The French law was not a traditional sumptuary law, but an economic protectionist measure intended to insulate the domestic cloth industry from foreign competition. Postrel quotes the French economist André Morellet lamenting the barbarity of this rule, writing in 1758,

Is it not strange that an otherwise respectable order of citizens solicits terrible punishments such as death and the galleys against Frenchmen, and does so for reasons of commercial interest? Will our descendants be able to believe that our nation was truly as enlightened and civilized as we now like to say when they read that in the middle of the eighteenth century a man in France was hanged for buying [banned cloth] to sell in Grenoble for 58 [coins]?

Despite such disproportionate punishments, the textile-smuggling trade continued.

Postrel’s book exposes the brutal realities woven into the history of textiles; stories not just of uplifting innovation, but of relentless toil, repression, and suffering. Her book fosters a deeper appreciation for the wide range of fabrics and clothes that we now take for granted, and it underscores the human resilience that made such abundance and choice possible.

Bloomberg | Labor Productivity

Chick-Fil-A’s Lemon-Squeezing Robots Save 10,000 Hours of Work

“In a plant north of Los Angeles, machines now squeeze as many as 1.6 million pounds of the fruit with hardly any human help. The facility, larger than the average Costco store at roughly 190,000 square feet, then ships bags of juice to Chick-fil-A locations, where workers add water and sugar to whip up the chain’s trademark lemonade.

The automated plant frees up in-store staff to serve customers faster, according to the company. Squeezing lemons was a tedious task that added up to 10,000 hours of work a day across all locations and resulted in many injured fingers.”

From Bloomberg.

Wall Street Journal | Labor Productivity

The American Worker Is Becoming More Productive

“Productivity in the U.S., as measured by how much the average worker gets done in an hour, has been on the rise. That matters because the faster that productivity grows, the faster the economy can grow as well. The success of the U.S. economy, and why it has grown so much compared with other countries over the past century and more, has hinged on its productivity. 

Productivity—the total output of the economy divided by hours worked—rose 2% in the third quarter compared with a year earlier, according to the Labor Department. That marked the fifth quarter in a row with an increase of 2% or better. In the five years before the pandemic, there were only two such quarters.

The gains in part reflect massive changes in the U.S. economy since the onset of Covid-19. Companies learned new ways of doing things and adopted new technologies, while an upheaval in the labor market moved workers into more productive jobs.

Another big change in the American labor force—a massive influx of immigration—might also have played a role. Immigrants are often slotted into manual-intensive jobs, which could allow other workers to move up to more highly skilled jobs.”

From The Wall Street Journal.

National Bureau of Economic Research | Labor Productivity

Robots and Labor in Nursing Homes

“How do employment, tasks, and productivity change with robot adoption? Unlike manufacturing, little is known about these issues in the service sector, where robot adoption is expanding. As a first step towards filling this gap, we study Japanese nursing homes using original facility-level panel data that includes the different robots used and the tasks performed. We find that robot adoption is accompanied by an increase in employment and retention and the relationship is strongest for non-regular care workers and monitoring robots. The share of specific tasks performed by robots increases with the adoption of the respective type of robot, leading to reallocation of care worker effort to ‘human touch’ tasks that support quality care. Robots are associated with improved quality (reduction in restraint use and pressure ulcers) and productivity.”

From National Bureau of Economic Research.